8 Bars with Alison Crockett
Our guest is vocalist, composer and educator Alison Crockett.
8 bars with, is a series on Educated Guesses where we offer up 8 questions to a special guest for them to ponder and freestyle on. The questions aren't necessarily questions as much as they are prompts or linguistic ink blots meant to stimulate thought. The responses can be short and pithy, long and loquacious or somewhere in between.
Proclaimed by Philadelphia Weekly magazine as a singer who combines “… Nina Simone’s urgency, Betty Carter’s chops and Jill Scott’s sass,” Washington, D.C.-based vocalist/bandleader/educator Alison Crockett (AKA Ms. Diva Blue) is an artist who - to paraphrase Duke Ellington - is “Beyond Category.” She’s worked and recorded with a variety of recording artists including DJ King Britt (who gave her the name Ms. Diva Blue), Blue Six, Landslide, John Wicks, Mathematics, saxophonist Greg Osby and the UK-based, acid jazz group Us3.
Her recordings as a leader include: Azure (2001), On Becoming A Woman (2004), a remix collection, The Return Of Diva Blue: On Becoming A Woman Redux, Bare (2007), Mommy What’s a Depression? (2012) and her Brazilian recording Obrigada (2018). On her latest album and first live record, Echoes of an Era Redux,
Crockett revisits and revitalizes the music of the 1982 Echoes of an Era LP’s that featured Khan, Nancy Wilson, Chick Corea, Freddie Hubbard, Stanley Clarke, Joe Henderson and Lenny White, which she first heard in her father’s record collection.
A 1989 alumnus of Sidwell Friends and the Duke Ellington School of The Arts, Crockett earned her degree in Vocal Jazz Performance at Temple University, and received her Masters Degree in Jazz Vocal Performance from The Manhattan School of Music in 1996. Crockett is currently an Adjunct Professor teaching Graduate Level Vocal Pedagogy at Shenandoah University in Winchester, VA.
1. Your Dad's record collection
My father had a huge collection of vinyl records that are mostly in my home now. I have an original Michael Jackson Thriller album along with Coltrane, Ahmad Jamal, Stevie Wonder, Chaka Khan, Lou Rawls, Lionel Richie, Sarah Vaughan, Dizzy Gillespie, Nat King Cole, Al Jarreau, there are so many. He played these records every night for 8 hours after work. My father was a man who had to deal with the stresses of being a former musician, who became a Black doctor in the post Civil Rights era. His music was his way to relax and express his feelings.
2. Vocal influences
There are too many: Dianne Reeves taught me how to sing high notes. Al Jarreau and Chaka Khan taught me rhythmic phrasing and improvisation. Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald taught me beautiful soulful singing. Cassandra Wilson and Betty Carter taught me how to be uniquely myself through being a true vocal musician. Stevie Wonder and Earth Wind and Fire taught me passionate singing that strikes people’s heart responding to harmony and time feel. Donna Summer and Sweet Honey in the Rock taught me how to belt it out.
3. Scatting
Improvisation is at the heart of everything we do as musicians. Scatting is our wordless way of saying a different story. It’s another moan and another playful way of being inside the music. It’s not about chords and scales. That’s the least important part, but made to feel like it’s the most important.
4. Jazz in College
It’s doing a disservice to the music how it’s being taught now. It’s taught from a European educational perspective. That’s how it could get into the schools to begin with so I understand. But our music isn’t just about the music. It’s about communal culture and that’s not really engaged in.
5. Greg Osby
He gave me my first big gig. My first review (and it was an awful review). He made me understand my own importance which he does to this day.
6. Us3
This group showed me the world and taught me how to write songs over anything at any time. I understood touring and the record industry by working with this group.
7. Recording in Brazil
It was wonderful. I had recently got divorced and decided to go to Brazil after a teacher/new friend of mine said to come. So I did. I did gigs down there with pianist Felipe Silviera who is a musical soul mate of mine. I put together a group of songs and he got the studio. The band showed me how to sing “O Cantador” by singing and playing it for 20 minutes. I learned that my musical background did not mean I knew everything. It was eye opening and beautiful.
8. Echoes of an Era
The record I heard over and over again with both Chaka Khan and Nancy Wilson. It shaped and molded me by hearing the past and that present in one shot. I saw the theatrical nature of jazz with its intellectual and spiritual side all mixed into regular standards and unique compositions and arrangements which is why I recreated the record: Echoes of an Era Redux: My Fathers Record Collection Vol. 1.
9. Bonus Question:
Mothering and music
Being a mother is the most terrific and challenging thing I have ever done. Doing it while being a musician is especially challenging, because my work is done at the time they need me. I have had to recalibrate how I do things in order to be their mom, not just the woman who birthed them. It takes a toll sometimes, but I have beautiful children who are successful and smart and compassionate and inquisitive. I’m a blessed person.